There are so many complex intertwining aspects of the Kavanaugh nomination that it boggles even the minds of people who, by the definition of their employment, have to hold the ideal of juggling opposing information. Complicating the basic issues of human dignity and privacy which pervade the process is the fact that most folks have no idea what it feels like to be truly socially and economically privileged and have little time or energy to develop an imagination to put themselves in that place.

There are basic forms of privilege that men feel, the privilege to catcall, to leer, to assume advances are welcome and to think this is the case even though there isn’t the impulse to follow through. There are additional privilege as white men that exist that allow them even greater flexibility to do so. White supremacist ideology isn’t reserved for avowed racists, it permeates the culture. Up another level is the assumptions that come along with being white, male and economically advantaged.

I had some exposure to this when I attended a prep school and later when dealing with students from Ivy League universities “as equals” engaging in activism. I had even greater exposure when I’d managed to weasel myself into a few Fraternity parties and other assorted functions reserved for that class. Enough exposure and enough reading allowed me to imagine some of the rest. I can’t for the life of me go completely “there,” but I do have enough in my own experience and in my own head to “feel” some of that privilege.

What so many are missing is how that enshrined mentality affects this curious state of play we find ourselves in currently, not just as far as this nomination but in the culture as a whole. At the junction of understanding what the wider agenda is, feeling that justified in a way and knowing still that the impulse is so utterly antidemocratic especially if we continue to believe in liberal democratic principles there is a tsunami of confusion that spins the steadiest of heads.

I’ve seen first hand how little understanding of the middle class the wealthy elites have, how casually they brush aside social norms and set thresholds of behavior that allow none of the boundaries the rest of us have. Classism, is much as Racism and Sexism is a growing prevailing disease in this country and the fully known privilege of the members of the exclusive club of truly wealthy elites, most of which still attain wealth, at least initially, through inheritance, is becoming legion. Like those fully emboldened now to show their true racist colors, the blatantly classist few are out there with their antidemocratic beliefs in full display.

Kavanaugh’s nomination as well as the man himself are rife with this ideology. The ideology of sheltered assumed superiority and privilege based on breeding and wealth and the assumption of being above the law and above codes of normalcy reserved for the rest of us. An example of this in plain sight for as long as I can remember is DKE the fraternity at the heart of many calls to police (and a subsequent eviction) in New Haven, and one which Kavanaugh was briefly a member is only one of many examples of this mentality enshrined in universities across the country. Institutional think tanks like the Reason foundation and the Club for Growth clean up the beer soaked assumption and often pill these suckling pigs off the teat of fraternity life and legitimize the assumption of superiority through breeding. These institutions lie at the juncture of early American ideals of land holding intelligentsia and a particularly and ironic strain of Libertarian white male supremacy that finally feels comfortable outing itself after Obama.

Make no mistake, there is a direct attempt to hijack our liberal democratic ideals and become a democratic republic in name only. There is a concerted effort to de-platform any attempt to bring this to the masses and create any sort of popular push-back against it. It is not solely Republican as many corporate Democrats come from these same institutions.

Kavanaugh is one shot after many and many more still to come. The information war (more irony as Alex Jones co-opted the notion for his own gain) has been in session for decades and through this president, at this time, it is raging full on. The war for democracy is in full swing and at this very moment democracy is losing. Where that war goes, and it can’t be partisan, will not only determine the fate of our liberal democracy but other liberal democratic countries throughout the world.

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Anyone who has a passing interest in cyber security and government has known since the Diebold debacle that these machines were and still are largely unregulated cyber holes. They are easily hacked and often running un-patched and outdated software with little or no upgrade path and are produced by companies with political ties and/or a political agenda.

Unfortunately, most Americans don’t give a rats ass.

I get it, people are busy and computers are complicated. People in power have always used the perception of complication, if not the actual complications themselves to dissuade people from voting or to sway their vote. Ignorance in general is a very useful tool in swaying peoples opinions.

Having some definitive proof of tampering may not do much to get most people riled up, but if it does alarm enough, there can be real change. Unfortunately, right now, we are in 1984 mode. We have little to guide us as to what the truth is and a president that is telling us to avoid trusting our own eyes and ears and trust only him.

Trump: I moved on her, actually. You know, she was down on Palm Beach. I moved on her, and I failed. I’ll admit it.

Unknown: Whoa.

Trump: I did try and fuck her. She was married.

Unknown: That’s huge news.

Trump: No, no, Nancy. No, this was [unintelligible] — and I moved on her very heavily. In fact, I took her out furniture shopping.

She wanted to get some furniture. I said, “I’ll show you where they have some nice furniture.” I took her out furniture —

I moved on her like a bitch. But I couldn’t get there. And she was married. Then all of a sudden I see her, she’s now got the big phony tits and everything. She’s totally changed her look.

Billy Bush: Sheesh, your girl’s hot as shit. In the purple.

Trump: Whoa! Whoa!

Bush: Yes! The Donald has scored. Whoa, my man!

[Crosstalk]

Trump: Look at you, you are a pussy.

[Crosstalk]

Trump: All right, you and I will walk out.

[Silence]

Trump: Maybe it’s a different one.

Bush: It better not be the publicist. No, it’s, it’s her, it’s —

Trump: Yeah, that’s her. With the gold. I better use some Tic Tacs just in case I start kissing her. You know, I’m automatically attracted to beautiful — I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.

Bush: Whatever you want.

Trump: Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.

Bush: Uh, yeah, those legs, all I can see is the legs.

Trump: Oh, it looks good.

Bush: Come on shorty.

Trump: Ooh, nice legs, huh?

Bush: Oof, get out of the way, honey. Oh, that’s good legs. Go ahead.

Trump: It’s always good if you don’t fall out of the bus. Like Ford, Gerald Ford, remember?

Bush: Down below, pull the handle.

Trump: Hello, how are you? Hi!

Arianne Zucker: Hi, Mr. Trump. How are you? Pleasure to meet you.

Trump: Nice seeing you. Terrific, terrific. You know Billy Bush?

Bush: Hello, nice to see you. How you doing, Arianne?

Zucker: Doing very well, thank you. Are you ready to be a soap star?

Trump: We’re ready, let’s go. Make me a soap star.

Bush: How about a little hug for the Donald? He just got off the bus.

Zucker: Would you like a little hug, darling?

Trump: O.K., absolutely. Melania said this was O.K.

Bush: How about a little hug for the Bushy? I just got off the bus.

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Zucker: Bushy, Bushy.

Bush: Here we go. Excellent. Well, you’ve got a nice co-star here.

Zucker: Yes, absolutely.

Trump: Good. After you.

[Break in video]

Trump: Come on, Billy, don’t be shy.

Bush: Soon as a beautiful woman shows up, he just, he takes off. This always happens.

Trump: Get over here, Billy.

Zucker: I’m sorry, come here.

Bush: Let the little guy in here, come on.

Zucker: Yeah, let the little guy in. How you feel now? Better? I should actually be in the middle.

Bush: It’s hard to walk next to a guy like this.

Zucker: Here, wait, hold on.

Bush: Yeah, you get in the middle, there we go.

Trump: Good, that’s better.

Zucker: This is much better. This is —

Trump: That’s better.

Zucker: [Sighs]

Bush: Now, if you had to choose honestly between one of us. Me or the Donald?

“Based on recent behavior and previous statements, the North Carolina Republican Party is unable and unwilling to support the Republican nominated candidate for North Carolina House District 48″ – GOP chairman Robin Hayes .

The Republican party has been putting up with the precursor to this for YEARS therefore encouraging and supporting it. Chickens….meet roost.

We don’t give a fuck that we are demonizing kids, both our own and those just yearning to breathe free. We’ve created a MS13 factory by separating kids from parents in the vain effort to use them as playing cards in our xenophobic deck.
We’ve hardened our hearts to each other in our webspheres and countless subreddits.
We’ve said the we want to protect life, but only if its politically expedient.
We turn our backs on each other because of our races, languages and the places we live. If we knew, truly, where we’ve been, the politicized history of denial of entry to those we feel are degenerate or lesser. From the Irish, to the Jew, to the Arab and the Mexican, someone always has to be less than us. And don’t even start me on “forced immigration.”
If there really is intelligent life out there and somehow they have condescended to look at us as microbes in a petri dish, they are surely appalled at our lack of care for each other and the big brownish ball we live on. We’d better be happy they can’t see us or haven’t yet found us or we’d surely be wiped off the face of the universe with extraterrestrial Lysol. Good news is that we probably won’t feel a thing.

We’ve become the absolute worst measure of humanity, our better angels have been slain by the devils we’ve nurtured through ignorance and greed.

Sometimes its hard to tell what our president is thinking. Sometimes I think he’s not thinking at all but reacting.

Yeah, I know, its been said before.

That’s why I haven’t been commenting much on Trump lately. There are far more people (both more qualified and less than I) making statements about and trying to guess what the president is thinking, probably more than at any other time since he’s been a public figure.

Just since November of 2016, the conversation has shifted from trying to do the math as to how he won in the first place to what he’ll do to where he was coming from to is he mentally fit to hold office. So many of these questions have obvious answers. He won by appealing to the baser instincts of a group of Americans who not only feel left behind but even if they voted for him, as many did, were swayed by the constant barrage of dog whistle idiocy that was the media during the Obama administration. They feel left behind by a country that always told them they were golden, chosen people, so when that promise was uncovered as a lie they rebelled. As with most popular rebellions, the scapegoat firewall lay between them and the people who truly fucked them over.

Never before in my lifetime have I seen the Country in such a state of reactionary fervor. If I’ve learned anything it is that you should never think things can’t get any worse, or any weirder. Sometimes being prepared for the worst is the best you can hope for. Not that you should abandon all hope or lose all sense of optimism, but keeping those things in the vacuum of the naive belief that “people are generally good” is downright suicidal.

I often try to look at recent history and try to draw a flowchart in my head to link all the things I’ve seen since the end of the Vietnam era ( I was born the year the conflict reached its Apex of 500,000 US troops) and remember middle-class. I mostly remember the palpable sense of dread that came with slowly admitting defeat in an unwinnable battle. I was born the year of nationwide unrest over the treatment of African-Americans (we were called negro, Colored or just Nigger at the time, in equal measure) and the year before the death of Martin Luther King.

I remember watching as the post-civil rights era played out, how legal segregation turned into redlining and blockbusting and I remember how the wash of irony felt as I sat in a real estate class 40 years later and heard my teacher discuss the practices as if they were ancient history (they weren’t, and aren’t). A few years before that I watched my Mom “steered” into a property in a mostly black part of town and in a double whammy also watched her sold a subprime mortgage with a huge balloon payment that would have kept her in permanent share-cropper status for the rest of her life. I watched as friends who had genius level IQ’s , but had little or no support at home, were shuffled into “alternative education” and taken out of the system of merit they would have all but taken over.

I watched the systematic dismantling of families, the ignorance of the problems faced by people who were just out of reach of the middle-class dream, not quite poverty-stricken, but barely able to make the rent, the car payment, and the heat, and often one or more of the above would suffer. (oh and food, let us not forget food)

I also remember being terror-stricken by television, the resurgence and resurgence, and further resurgences of “hate groups,” militias and various other largely white organizations whose members instinctively knew that their days as the majority were numbered. Who ignored the unequal application of benefits to them and cherry-picked statistics to bolster their own “superiority” (there is nothing funnier and scarier than listening to someone uneducated and unwilling to be, call me a monkey) even when they had an 8th-grade education and hardly a tooth to speak of.

I saw the 50-year slide into identity politics. WHITE identity politics. And now I shake my head when I hear someone like Richard Spenser, Alex Jones or any of their loosely affiliated internet sleeper cell operatives promote the narrative that Blacks, “the Left” and the “the gays” are the ones who started this whore identity politics shit. As a writer, I look out into the world, and it makes no narrative sense, as a truth-teller the story is flawed in a way that disqualifies it even as magical realism. There is nothing real about it.

As I look over all the historical links in my lifetime, I see definite patterns. Some overlap and others diverge, but a few, though taking up different sections of the page, clearly resemble each other.

Taking the experiences of poor White Americans and Poor Black Americans in snapshots of events, drug addiction, poverty, enslavement (Blacks by government mandate through slavery and its aftermath and whites by government mandate through union busting and land grants to wealthy corporations) they trace similar paths. The positive elements also converge, reverence for the elderly, a sense of community, developments in art and culture, resistance to undue authority…

But somehow, some way, the two rarely meet.

They don’t meet because one group, although downtrodden, believed that they were better by virtue of “whiteness”. That belief carried down through the years and was the current on the river to Trumpville.

This is not fake news.

Thinking for a second about some of the self-described leaders of these folks and their motivations there has to be something other than the endgame that gets them off. Even if they could eliminate or disassociate themselves from the rest of us there are still going to be sociopathic tendencies, violent individuals, and disagreements within their midsts.

I often wonder how an ethnostate of any sort would look. Having no skin in the game and no need to wish for such a thing I think I’m a bit freer than most to imagine a more realistic version of this utopia.

It would be like any other society, divided along some imaginary, or real but either way subtly enforced means, messy and stratified and pretty much just as fucked up as the one we have now. Either it would have classlessness imposed by a tyrant, or be capitalistic and leave some people behind. Either way, there is no escape from the same bullshit we face daily, it would just be whiter, or blacker. There is no way, through merely segregating “Europeans” or “Africans” to magically make everything better. The same power struggles, the same marital disagreements, the same arguments about government and what it should and can do will still exist.

Just because y’all look the same, does not make you the same.

Have you ever seen people who agree, are of the same background or the same political beliefs all in the same room together and NOT arguing? In most cases, intra-group disagreements are more violent than those between groups. Without the political or racial “other” to swerve the distraction bus towards, those conflicts would explode.